I have firsthand experience with one: Rhogam. Like 15 percent of the population, I lack the Rhesus factor in my blood, which means I have a negative blood type. If your partner has a positive blood type (or if their blood type is unknown), the fetus can inherit their factor, causing problems with the pregnancy. Pregnant people in this position can be given an injection of rho(D) immune globulin, such as Rhogam, to create antibodies that desensitize our physiological response if our blood comes into contact with the fetus’ blood, should it be Rhesus positive. Without the injection, it could be problematic for not only the health of the pregnant person and developing pregnancy, but the development of future pregnancies. Normally, Rhogam isn’t given during pregnancy until the 28th week, but abortion providers still routinely provide it at earlier gestations.

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I had the privilege of using insurance when I delivered my two children, including one through a cesarean section. Unexpected fees weren’t something I anticipated when I needed an abortion while living uninsured — and I live in Texas, where in 2017 a bill passed prohibiting insurance plans from providing coverage for abortion unless the pregnant person has a separate premium they’ve purchased specifically for abortion. And for most people, Medicaid won’t cover it, either. I learned I’d need to pay $100 because of my blood type, on top of $450 for a surgical abortion. My local abortion fund helped, but it wasn’t enough for me to afford Rhogam and sedation. So I experienced my surgical abortion completely aware, which wasn’t comfortable for me. Nor what I wanted, since medical settings give me anxiety.

Some clinics have taken measures to address the challenges of added fees. And abortion funds, such as the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, also provide financial assistance. Some abortion providers combine what would typically be additional costs with the price of the abortion, or try to be up front about these fees on their websites. But not everyone has access to the internet, or if they do, it isn’t always easy to find accurate information. Crisis pregnancy centers often use similar names to trick people, who may not realize they’re on a site that isn’t legitimate. So it isn’t unusual for us to learn — for the first time — that we have to pay hundreds of dollars upon visiting the clinic.

“We’ve had patients who choose our clinic specifically because we don’t charge for Rhogam,” one clinic told me. Other clinics may waive the fee for those who need help paying for it, when resources are available to do so. “We received a grant that allowed us to provide our patients with financial assistance for things, and at the time we decided to use it on Rhogam, so people wouldn’t have to miss their appointment over an unexpected thing,” another clinic said. “We recognize the hardship this creates for many people, especially when a lot of people have no idea what their blood type is to begin with.”

The extra cost of Rhogam increased the time one patient needed to pay back a loan they took out on their car in order to afford the procedure. “I had to travel to a different state because it was closer than the clinic where I lived. I had the money from a loan I took out already, but when I found out I’d need to pay $100 more because of my blood type — in addition to the barriers I was already facing — I realized I’d be stuck in this cycle of debt longer than I hoped for,” they said.

I also spoke with Desiree — whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. “I remember standing at the window and being told it would be an extra $100 because of my blood type. It had already taken me weeks to get the $400, and I needed an abortion a few days before rent was due. I had to step aside and really think about what this could mean for my living situation,” she said, since she’d already needed assistance from a local abortion fund.

Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder and executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told TalkPoverty: “We hear from many callers that struggle more because of these extra costs. It’s already hard as it is to raise hundreds of dollars for the procedure, especially for our callers who are experiencing homelessness and other barriers related to accessing abortion.”

This issue also affects those who don’t have a negative blood type. “I wasn’t even Rh-negative, but the clinic I went to gives everyone Rhogam,” said another patient. She said the additional cost caused her to drive home on “fumes,” because she had to use her last $50 that was originally intended for gas after driving out of town for her abortion.

When it comes to the extra cost associated with Rhogam, fortunately, things are changing. In Contraception Journal, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) recognized last year that testing for the Rhesus factor in abortion care has become a barrier. They refer to Dutch guidelines, which say the injection is unnecessary for pregnancies less than eight weeks — and Sweden also recommends against the injection for early medical abortion.

NAF recently updated its recommendations regarding when Rhogam is required. They no longer recommend it for early abortions less than eight weeks, most of which are medical abortions and account for two thirds of the abortions performed in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute. Now, people with a negative blood type — who find out about their pregnancy early on — may have the ability to forego Rhogam at NAF-member clinics. Some experts say it isn’t necessary for a first pregnancy at all.

Dr. Alice Mark, NAF’s Medical Director, told TalkPoverty: “We know giving the Rhogam injection at 28 weeks decreases the risk of sensitization, but what we don’t know is that any intervention before that has any impact on the outcomes…The studies [on sensitization] use methods that are outdated, and we were doing this intervention without knowing whether or not it benefited patients.” They drew heavily on data from Europe, where not providing Rhogam early in gestation has “no appreciable impact.”

Dr. Mark stressed that some clinics may want to follow American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommendations to protect their patients, and that’s not wrong. “But because we’ve made this change, it’s been taken to ACOG to be discussed on their committees,” said Dr. Mark.

One clinic I spoke with told TalkPoverty that, “We’re going to follow the [NAF] recommendations, and we should be updating the guidelines in the next month. All of our physicians are really excited to follow these guidelines — there’s a lot of research on it. It’s an extra barrier for patients.” Patients are also growing more aware. “I didn’t need it because I’m less than eight weeks,” said one person I spoke with before her abortion.

This isn’t the fault of clinics. It is the result of the systemic issues related to extreme abortion restrictions. After all, paying for abortion could be a lot easier if there wasn’t a federal ban on public funding. Independent clinics perform the majority of abortions in the U.S., but they receive absolutely no support from our government. Use of state dollars for Medicaid reimbursements for abortions is highly restricted in Texas and a number of other states, so while some providers may combine these additional fees in the cost of the abortion, it’s inevitable not all would be able to in order to sustain the operation of the clinic. In eleven states, including Texas, most people can’t use their private health insurance for their abortion, either.

And with providers across the country facing closures due to medically unnecessary restrictions, accessing a clinic becomes less of a reality for many even without these additional costs. Next month, Missouri will give a final ruling in the case of the state’s only abortion provider shutting down. Six states currently have only one clinic, and Missouri could be the first with zero. In Texas, we have the most cities more than 100 miles away from an abortion clinic. For some of us, there is no choice: we’re forced to continue a pregnancy we don’t feel ready for.

Because even though we have a legal right to have an abortion, lawmakers continue to remind us that our right to choose means nothing if we can’t access it.

The other half? Paying to get to the procedure itself — a task that can cost hundreds of dollars on its own and eat up hours, if not days, of travel time in states that lack usable local public transit systems or mass transportation between rural and urban areas.

Nearly 20 percent of poor people lack their own vehicle, and the same states that pass paternalistic abortion restrictions are also the states least likely to spend infrastructure funding dollars on mass transit, considering it a form of “social welfare” for those too poor to own cars. States like Mississippi, Missouri, or Kentucky, which have just one clinic each, lack usable public transit within their borders, or easy access into major cities from suburbs and rural towns via train, light-rail, or even major bus lines.

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The limited number of abortion clinics — often paired with face to face waiting periods that are anywhere from one to three days apart — and the shortage of transportation infrastructure means that low-income patients without a car are often forced to hire taxies and other car services, rent vehicles, or navigate an expensive bus or train schedule at a time when they are emotionally and in some cases physically vulnerable, too.

“We’ve had patients use Uber to get to [Jackson Women’s Health Organization] in Jackson [Mississippi] from Oxford or Hattiesburg,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told TalkPoverty. “I didn’t even know you could go that far.” The cost? Around $200 for a 90-mile trip.

The logistical challenges quickly pile up. Alabama — which has three clinics spread throughout the state — has Amtrak, but the route through the state is limited and scheduling is difficult. This makes navigating the transit options a search for the right combination of trains and bus routes — often shuffling the same patient from bus to train and back again. Abortion funds — organizations that offer financial support for those seeking out a pregnancy termination — can offer gas cards, but that still requires patients to have a car to begin with. For those in one-car families, that also means letting another family member or friend into a very private, personal decision, too.

Amanda Reyes, co-founder of the Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion funding and practical support group for pregnant people in Alabama, said for patients outside a city — even just in the exurbs of the cities that do have clinics — renting a car is often the only solution. But for people who are low income and lack not only the funds for renting but also the credit cards, debit cards, or checking accounts needed to rent a car in the first place — about 20 percent of Americans are considered “unbanked or underbanked” — this can be nearly impossible. Because of Alabama’s requirement that patients visit a clinic and then wait 48 hours before returning for a termination, the car is needed for multiple days; the Yellowhammer Fund typically rents cars for a week.

“That’s why we got ourselves a van,” said Roberts. Now, with a van that can get patients from far out cities or towns to the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, Roberts is able to help some patients avoid that extra expense. It’s assistance that no doubt means even more to some local abortion patients who may hire a cab from one of the city’s taxi companies only to have it arrive with “Choose Life” etched into the side of the car’s body, according to Roberts.

Getting to a clinic without a car is a nightmare even when the provider itself is only a 15-minute drive away. Hiring taxis, Uber, or Lyft always means providing a name, and often a home address, to a driver. That can be especially difficult when ride app drivers refuse to serve neighborhoods that are predominately black or even refuse a ride once they realize the client is a person of color, as once happened with one of Roberts’ clients. In St. Louis, where Missouri’s only abortion provider is currently fighting the state to keep its doors open (it was just granted permission to continue operating until early August while it awaits a final decision), getting from a home in the north side of the city to the St. Louis Planned Parenthood can take hours, simply because the busing system exists as a means of keeping neighborhoods segregated from each other, rather than interconnected.

“The bus system is woefully underfunded and not super accessible for most people,” explains Alison Dreith, former executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri and current deputy director for Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois, which is just 10 minutes across the river from St. Louis. “It doesn’t go into North St. Louis, which is primarily a poor, black community. It would take multiple buses and transfers. It’s not just accessible.”

Then there is the more complicated — but not entirely rare — case of the patient who is worried about domestic violence, abuse, or has other safety concerns that make it necessary to hide the entire process from their partners, families, or the person who got them pregnant. “I spent 45 minutes calling every rental car agency in Birmingham,” Reyes told TalkPoverty, explaining the extra steps required to help a patient who was getting an abortion without informing an abusive spouse, and who needed to cover her actions along the way. “She couldn’t take a bus, she needed to rent a car, and she needed to be able to do it using cash so he wouldn’t see a charge for it. To get a car that way, you have to call the day before to see if anything is available.”

Cash-only rental cars often require the cash upfront, in addition to $300 or more in deposits in case of damage or theft. While an abortion at seven weeks would only be around $600, the costs for travel and other support were expected to be nearly three times that amount for Reyes’ client. It is just one of the many ways that a patient can be blocked from obtaining an early abortion and instead require a termination in the second trimester, instead, where the cost of an abortion rises with each additional week of gestation.

Getting the money for an abortion when you are poor and in a conservative state or rural community is only half the battle. Without an adequate public transit infrastructure, those with the ability to afford a termination may become trapped in pregnancies they do not want, simply because they lack the means to make it to their appointments. And the same legislators who have starved off transportation infrastructure in the name of rejecting “social welfare” will then deny those pregnant people any medical assistance, accessible contraception, living wages, childcare or safe housing, all while being the ones who forced them into this impossible situation in the first place.

It took the entirety of both the state’s regular legislative session and a month-long special session, but the bipartisan bill finally crossed the finish line. The new law will extend the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force’s expiration date to 2023 and require it to report on disparities in pregnancy-related deaths (including socio-economic status) and best practices in lowering mortality rates in other states, as well as actually evaluate options to reduce maternal deaths.

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The task force, which was created in 2013, has already identified a lack of early pregnancy care as a significant contributor to death. In some ways, that’s unsurprising: Nearly 25 percent of Texas women are uninsured, and the state leads the country in the total uninsured rate. Because of cost, over the past year 52 percent of Texas women reported skipping a doctor’s appointment or test, not getting specialist care, or being unable to fill a prescription. This is a far higher percentage than what was found in states with similar uninsured rates, such as Florida, as well as in states with similar populations, such as California.

Despite this bleak picture for women in need of care, the legislature failed to send any proposals to the governor that would have actually provided for greater coverage for the treatment and care of women struggling financially.

One reason for the high uninsured rate is the state’s extremely restrictive Medicaid eligibility standards: In addition to failing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, parents of two children in Texas must earn less than $386 a month to qualify for Medicaid coverage. (That’s only one-fifth of the federal poverty level, which is $2,050 for a family of four). Texas allows more women to gain care through Medicaid during the duration of their pregnancy, but drops them 60 days after delivery. The task force also found that the majority of deaths occur more than 42 days after birth—likely after many women at risk for death lost access to the program.

In discussing Texas’ maternal mortality rate, many advocates have noted that births paid for by Medicaid (which are unfortunately higher-risk than those paid for by private insurance) significantly increased after the state cut family planning programs by tens of millions in 2011. The cuts must also be factored into understanding why Texas’ mortality rate has stayed consistently high for years after the initial spike.

But, though the state has undoubtedly been slashing family planning funds and shuttering clinics at a reckless rate for several years now, the fact is that the dramatic increases in deaths began before these reckless policies were passed and implemented.

There are other early findings that do not have clear answers yet. Despite being among most likely to be uninsured, Latina women were found to have an even lower mortality rate than white women. In contrast, African American women are disproportionately likely to experience maternal death: While only accounting for approximately 11 percent of births, these women make up about 29 percent of deaths.

The task force’s new responsibility to evaluate approaches in other states will prove illuminating for some of these unanswered questions: North Carolina, for example, implemented a variety of programs to incentivize doctors examining women for conditions that could lead to high-risk pregnancies and provide wraparound supports for those expectant mothers facing health dangers. By doing so, the state made a huge stride forward that should—and must—catch the attention of Texas’ policymakers: It closed the racial gap in the rate of maternal deaths in white and black mothers.

After an onslaught of statistics, it’s important to remember that behind every death statistic is a woman who suffered. Expectant parents everywhere wake up worried about coping with the newborn months. Too many mothers-to-be in Texas, however, must also wake up worried about whether they will even live to see their child crawl or walk.

Given that mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners in more than 60 percent of Texas households, these deaths are not only personal tragedies but ones that can devastate the economic standing of a family. Already, 1 in 4 Texas children live in poverty. And since the average age of new mother is 26, health problems related to birth may hit as a young woman is still working to launch her career with little savings built up.

It would be unacceptable to allow this to continue. The legislature passed a law that will spur research that will illuminate a greater understanding of how to effectively improve maternal health and lower the rates of maternal death. It will be essential, however, for those who truly care to turn that analysis into meaningful change.

This inference is alarming and it has garnered significant press, including articles in Vox and The New York Times. However, there’s a basic misunderstanding at the core of the research that could harm women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care—particularly affordable and safe abortions.

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Stephens-Davidowitz’s research mistakenly conflates “self-induced abortion” with “illegal abortion,” though the two terms apply to two very different procedures. A self-induced abortion is simply an abortion that can be conducted within the comfort of one’s home. That includes medical abortions, also referred to as the “abortion pill,” which can be used to end early-term pregnancies. An illegal abortion, on the other hand, is often what we think of as a “coat hanger abortion”—it’s one of the risky procedures women undergo when other options (such as self-induced medication abortions) are not available.

Self-induced abortions are safe and fairly common: They accounted for 31 percent of all nonhospital abortions in 2014. “People choose to self-induce for a variety of reasons,” said Jill Adams, founding executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law. “The flexibility of conducting the procedure at home on one’s own timeline is paramount, and self-induced abortion can be significantly cheaper than surgical abortion.”

But misinformation about self-induced abortion, namely that using the abortion pill is a dangerous practice, could ultimately make it harder to access. Anti-choice advocates and legislators have seized on this type of misinformation in the past, most notably through TRAP lawsTargeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, are specific legal requirements for abortion providers that are different (and more difficult to comply with) than the requirements for other medical practices. Examples include specifying specific hallway widths, staffing requirements, or admitting privileges. that require medically unnecessary updates to clinics that provide abortions as an indirect way to reduce abortions.

If that happens, it will hit women with few other options the hardest. Medical abortion is particularly crucial for people who would otherwise struggle to access reproductive health care, including people living in rural areas and women of color. Rural patients face clear physical barriers: 31 percent of women living in rural areas traveled more than 100 miles to access abortion services, and an additional 43 percent traveled between 50 and 100 miles. For women of color, who often suffer from a variety of barriers to abortion—such as financial instability, limited access to a broad range of providers, and distance from clinics—medication abortion can be the most cost-effective and low-risk abortion procedure.

There’s a chance that the searches Stephens-Davidowitz reports could simply represent an increase in medically accurate information. Telemedicine has revolutionized abortion care for the aforementioned groups. In 2006, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland in Iowa launched a telemedicine service that provided medical abortion care at rural clinics. The initiative was wildly successful: Research showed that telemedicine availability increased access to abortion care for people living in remote parts of the state. Moreover, the study showed that telemedicine availability increased access for women seeking abortion services at earlier gestational stages, for which medical abortion could be a silver bullet against the cost, distance, and stigma of an in-clinic abortion. In short, Google results for “self-induced abortion” may have ticked up because more women are simply aware that it exists.

While it seems intuitive that restrictive abortion laws would increase the incidence of illegal abortions, the inference that Stephens-Davidowitz draws about self-induced abortions is not necessarily backed up by the Google search data. Clear, detailed terminology is critical in discussing abortion, especially when the consequences can result in devastating outcomes for people seeking health care. Mistaken inferences, even when they have good intentions, have harmful consequences when placed in the nefarious hands of anti-choice activists—and can result in even more limitations on women’s health care.

Here are a few big deal political maneuvers that haven’t received the reporting—or an outcry from a distracted public—that they need and deserve.

Reversing the Ban on Neurotoxic Pesticide

In March, the Trump administration’s Office of Pesticide Programs—which last year received 30 percent of its operating budget from the pesticide-manufacturing industry—canceled the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed ban of chlorpyrifos, a common pesticide used on crops that was derived from nerve gas developed by the Nazis.

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The Obama administration had called for the ban after “three long-term, independently funded studies showed the substance was toxic,” according to Reuters. Particularly vulnerable are farmworkers, and the brain development of children, infants, and fetuses.

“Chlorpyrifos has been shown beyond any shadow of a doubt to damage the brains of children, especially those of fetuses in the womb,” said Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The American Academy of Pediatrics also urged EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to reconsider his decision.

Yet Pruitt saw fit to hail the ban reversal as “returning to using sound science in decision-making.”

Dow Chemical—whose CEO leads a White House manufacturers working group—sells the chemical. More than 6 million pounds of it are used annually in the United States on crops like apples, oranges, broccoli, berries, and tree nuts. Two months after Pruitt’s decision, more than 50 farmworkers in cabbage fields were sickened when winds blew the chemical from nearby mandarin orchards.

You can get informed and fight for a chlorpyrifos ban here and here. You can tell grocers to stop buying foods that might have residue from the chemical here. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) has introduced a bill to ban the pesticide.

Nixing Science-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs

Last month, the administration cut more than $213 million from teen pregnancy prevention programs and research, eliminating the final two years of funding for 5-year projects. More than 80 institutions across the country lost their funding, and none of the programs provided abortion counseling.

Health officials told the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) that denying funding midway through a grant is “highly unusual and wasteful because it means there can be no scientifically valid finding.”

Some of the programs cut include: work Johns Hopkins University has been doing with American Indian teens to reduce sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy; University of Southern California’s workshops for parents on “how to talk to middle school kids about delaying sexual activity”; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center program that helps “doctors talk to Native American and Latino teens about avoiding pregnancy”; and Planned Parenthood’s work in five states to bring “rural youths and parents together to share family values, strengthen family bonds, and talk about healthy relationships and sexual health.”

“We’re not out there doing what feels good,” Luanne Rohrbach, associate professor of preventive medicine at USC, told CIR. “We’re doing what we know is effective.”

Despite the fact that the teen birth rate has declined steadily over the past 20 years, the ongoing need for science-based approaches to pregnancy prevention is clear. CIR notes that the rate is still high compared to other industrialized nations, and the decline isn’t as steep in low-income communities. Perhaps that’s why the cuts were made outside the normal appropriations process as the administration pursues an ideologically-driven agenda that is out of step with real public health and education needs.

You can let your elected representatives know how you feel about this decision here.

DACA at Risk

In June, 10 states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, informed the Trump administration that it must end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by September 5 or face a lawsuit that would be heard by an anti-immigrant judge who has halted similar initiatives in the past.

Past assurances by a notoriously fickle president to keep DACA intact are hardly sufficient. Even if the administration ignores the deadline, there is little reason to believe Attorney General Jeff Sessions would defend DACA in court. As Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) told The Washington Post, “Jeff Sessions is going to say, ‘Deport them.’ If you’re going to count on Jeff Sessions to save DACA, then DACA is ended.”

More than 780,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” have been protected from deportation and made eligible to work since DACA’s inception in 2012. Seventy-eight percent of voters believe Dreamers should be allowed to remain in the United States permanently, including 73 percent of Trump voters.

Aside from the moral argument that people who grew up as Americans should be allowed to remain in the country, the Center for American Progress notes the economic case as well. Ending DACA would drain more than $460 billion from the national GDP over the next decade, and remove about 685,000 workers from the economy. Combined, the 10 states that are suing would lose $8 billion annually.

There is an opportunity take this issue out of the hands of extremists like the Texas attorney general and an unpredictable Trump administration. In July, the DREAM Act of 2017 was introduced with bipartisan support from Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

You can let your elected representatives know you want them to support DACA here.

Chemical Accident Prevention and Protection Delayed

After a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas, killed 15 people, including 12 firefighters, and injured 260—the Obama administration directed the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen the safety requirements for facilities using and storing potentially toxic or dangerous chemicals.

In January 2017, after four years of deliberations, the EPA finalized its Chemical Accident Safety Rule, which would apply to more than 12,000 chemical facilities across the nation. It included commonsense measures like making information more available to communities to support emergency preparedness, and safety audits.

However, in June, after complaints from the chemical industry that the new rule “may actually compromise the security of our facilities, emergency responders, and our communities,” the Trump administration delayed implementation until February 2019. Even as it did so, it released a fact sheet noting 58 deaths and $2 billion worth of property damage caused by 1,517 facility accidents over the past 10 years.

A coalition of 11 states led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has sued the EPA over the delay. You can tell EPA Administrator Pruitt to implement the new rule here.

Trump is losing many of his high-profile fights. But in dozens of less-noticed ways, his administration is advancing its extreme agenda that exacerbates political and economic inequality. As much of the media remains fixated on the Russia story and the Great Trump Dysfunction, journalists and advocates will need to work harder than ever to make sure the damaging daily actions of this administration aren’t ignored.

This article is a collaboration between TalkPoverty and The Nation.

Alison Cassady, Director of Domestic Energy and Environment Policy at the Center for American Progress, contributed research for this article.

This move came at the recommendation of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Tom Price. In many ways, it’s on brand with Price’s career as an enthusiastic advocate for restricting women’s choices: He has signed personhood acts that ban emergency contraception and abortion, opposed the Obamacare birth control mandate, tried to defund Planned Parenthood, and defended cuts to Medicaid that would deny millions of low-income women health care.

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On an intellectual level, Price’s cuts are frustrating because they represent another piece of a regressive puzzle the Trump administration is assembling in order to control women’s choices. And personally, I’m devastated because I know what these cuts mean to the communities that they will affect.

I attended public school for my entire K-12 education in Tom Price’s former district, where abstinence-only education is the norm. The single day of sex education I received promoted the idea that all sexual acts outside of a heterosexual marriage are dangerous and shameful, and did not make any distinction about whether these acts were consensual or not. It espoused gendered roles that posited women as defenders of their precious virginity, and put the responsibility on women to prevent sex from happening to them. That’s perfectly in line with the content requirements for sex education in Georgia: They consciously exclude information about contraception, coercion, orientation, and HIV/AIDS, and they stress abstinence and marriage.

Because I was lucky, and because I am privileged, I was able to go to a college with real resources—extracurricular trainings, a health clinic, and actual academic courses—that helped me unlearn the detrimental sexual education I received in high school. I got the practical information that I needed, and I started unraveling my skewed concept of consent.

When I attended a “Take Back the Night” rally my freshman year of college, I realized that my abstinence-only education had led me to view myself as responsible for sexual acts committed without my consent. Consequently, I felt shame instead of empowerment to take the steps I needed to recover. This is a common phenomenon for young people that experience abstinence-only education; when all expressions of sexuality are described as negative and shameful, the lines between consensual and nonconsensual acts become blurred.

College gave me a second chance at sex ed, but a lot of people don’t have that opportunity. For rural communities, low-income communities, and communities of color, high school sex education and community-based programs are often the only options available to acquire stigma-free, accurate education about consent, contraception, and sexual health. These populations already face myriad barriers to sex education, including culture, finances, and distance. In my home state of Georgia, there are only four Planned Parenthood clinics—one of the only affordable health centers with enough name recognition that people know to seek it out when they need help—and three of the four are located in the Atlanta metro area in the northwest corner of the state.

Still, teen pregnancy and birth rates are at an all-time low across the country. Georgia has experienced one of the most drastic declines in these rates, from the highest teen birth rate in the United States in 1995 to the 17th in 2015. The grants that Price slashed last week were a part of that story. The target audience of all of these programs are marginalized youth who have a demonstrated need for increased education. And these are the groups that are at the greatest risk for high teen birth rates: Rural counties reported an average birth rate of 30.9 (30.9 teens per 1,000 females aged 15–19), compared with the much lower rate of 18.9 for urban counties. Similarly, black and Latino teenagers experience teen pregnancy at rates twice as high as white teenagers. For these communities, removing teen pregnancy prevention programs that these grants funded will restore the negative effects of abstinence-only education that the grants were originally provided to combat. For example, one of the programs cut was run by the Augusta Partnership for Children Inc., which focuses on reducing teen pregnancy and STI rates in four rural East Georgia counties. In one of these counties, Augusta-Richmond county, the teen birthrate is 22.9 percent higher than the state average.

These cuts can’t be written off as a difference in ideology. I experienced firsthand the powerlessness that results from a shaming, abstinence-focused education, and it can be a matter of life and death for communities already on the margins. I had a second chance at a more holistic education, but it was due to luck and privilege that most folks in Georgia do not have access to. And when we’re talking about pregnancy, HIV/AIDS infection rates, and domestic and sexual violence, luck and privilege shouldn’t be the factors we have to rely on.

Pence’s vote came as no surprise. A week into his tenure as vice president, he addressed thousands of abortion opponents at the 44^th annual March for Life. Days earlier, his administration instituted a particularly draconian version of the Global Gag Rule, which bans NGOs that receive U.S. aid from counseling anyone on abortion, and a week later it announced a nominee to the Supreme Court chosen in no small part because he poses an existential threat to Roe v. Wade.

All in the name of traditional family values.

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Pence has built an entire career on his family values narrative. In 2006, as a Congressman, he supported a constitutional amendment to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman—same-sex couples, he said, threaten to usher in “societal collapse.” In 2015, as governor of Indiana, he made national news for signing a bill that legalized discrimination against LGBT couples. A year later, he signed a law restricting access to abortion and—as part of his continued quest to make health care as awful as possible for women—requiring that fetal remains from abortions or miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy be buried or cremated.

Plus, there’s that bit of weirdness where he calls his wife “mother,” and won’t dine alone with women or attend events with alcohol unless she’s present.

The irony of these positions, which he insists are in defense of families, is that he is actively undermining them.

For starters, access to reproductive health care, which gives families control over if and when they have children, increases economic security. That makes families less likely to undergo conflict. On the flip side, laws that restrict access to abortion actively endanger families’ financial security. Generally, the birth of a child is a big expense—and if its’s unplanned or mistimed, it’s more likely to cause an economic shock or plunge a family into poverty. Financial stress, in turn, can lead to divorce or relationship dissolution as well as domestic violence.

And all those anti-LGBT policies? LGBT people have families, too—and when Pence denies them the right to get married or use the bathroom, he denies them the humanity that he grants families that look more like his own: “Christian, conservative, and Republican—in that order.” And when he opposes legislation that prohibits discrimination against LGBT workers, like he did in 2007 and again in 2015, he also jeopardizes their families’ economic security.

Even Pence’s intense devotion to his wife, which the internet mostly wrote off as eccentric codependency, works to undermine families. When he refuses to eat dinner or attend events with female staffers––allegedly to resist temptation from other women and to uphold the sanctity of his marriage––he denies them a professional opportunity that he makes available to men. One-on-one time with managers can lead to professional capital that makes salaries or promotions possible. Pence’s inability to treat women as professional counterparts, rather than objects of sexual temptation, excludes them from those opportunities for job growth. That brings us back to women’s financial security, and—once again—to their families.

Pence’s intense devotion to “traditional family values,” isn’t wholesome, or pious, or even just weird. It’s radical and dangerous. And less than 100 days into his vice presidency, we haven’t even scratched the surface.

“Do they understand if they cut that off that lots more people are going to be pregnant?” she said.

Barrientos, a 28-year-old woman who I met near her home in New Hampshire, had serious complications when she was pregnant. Her daughter, who’s almost three now, was born three months early. Her doctor has told her that if she gets pregnant again, she’ll have to be on bed rest for the whole nine months. Even so, the pregnancy would still be risky. So, although she wishes she could have another child someday, she uses an IUD to make sure it doesn’t happen—not just for her own sake, but for her daughter’s.

“You can’t be in bed for nine months with a little one,” she said.

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Barrientos said she used to work as a pharmacy tech and a line cook, but chronic health problems forced her to quit. She gets her health insurance through Medicaid, which pays the full cost of long-term birth control.

If she had to pay out of pocket, she said, there’s no way she could afford the IUD—it has an upfront cost of around $1,000.

“By the time I pay my bills and my rent, I’m broke,” she said.

This year, Congress is pursuing an array of plans that would reduce access to family planning resources. Repealing the Affordable Care Act could mean employers no longer have to offer plans that cover contraceptives, and defunding Planned Parenthood would eliminate the only place to find free and low-cost family planning in many communities. And for women like Barrientos, a rollback of the Medicaid expansion—and transformation of the entire program into state block grants—would endanger access to all sorts of care.

Lydia Mitts, senior policy analyst with the health care advocacy group Families USA, said that before the ACA millions of women struggled to afford birth control. Many had to pay the entire cost out of pocket, and copays were a struggle for people living paycheck to paycheck before the mandate required insurers to cover the full cost.

“It was a win for women’s healthcare, but it was also a win for families and women’s ability to plan when they want to start a family,” Mitts said. “I think everyone wants to be empowered to make those big life decisions and kind of pursue their dreams at the pace that makes sense for them and their spouse and their children.”

Empirical evidence backs up what most parents—and people who aren’t yet ready to become parents—are well aware of: Being able to choose when to have kids leads to healthier families. Kids and their parents are physically and mentally better off, and families are more stable financially. Researchers found that children born in areas with federally-funded reproductive health care clinics were 4.2 percent less likely to live in poverty as children and 2.4 percent less likely to experience poverty as adults.

The current leaders in Congress argue that their policies, which rely heavily on a free-market approach, empower families to make their own decisions free of government coercion. But the ACA mandates and Medicaid expansion, along with providers like Planned Parenthood, are giving women long-term contraception options that used to be hard to come by. Data from states like Texas show what happens when those services are cut—the state has seen a 36 percent decline in the use of long-acting contraceptive methods, a rising birth rate, and an uptick in maternal mortality.

In a particularly distressing twist, the same policy changes that would reduce access to birth control would also make it harder to receive prenatal care. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services has found that, before the ACA, 62 percent of individual market enrollees didn’t have coverage for maternity care. Many women also lacked insurance altogether, putting them at much greater risk for serious health problems during pregnancy.

“It’s challenging to listen to discussion about eroding women’s access to birth control at the same time as eroding their access to care if they end up pregnant,” Mitts said. “We want to make sure women have the reproductive care they need, and then health care they need to have a healthy family, have a healthy baby.”

That seems like common sense to a lot of people. Just a few blocks away from Lorena Barrientos’s home, I ran into Michele Dumont. She recalled going to Planned Parenthood back in the 1980s to get her birth control pills and braving a line of protestors who were angry that the clinic also offered abortions.

“I already had two children in diapers, and I definitely didn’t want a third in diapers,” she said.

Dumont said her children are grown now, but she thinks a lot about people she knows who could be hurt if their family planning options disappeared.

“Believe me, they would not want to see me in Congress,” she said.

Correction: This article originally stated that Barrientos’s daughter was born three weeks premature. She was born three months premature.

Hyde is often siloed as a “women’s issue.” But when women cannot control their bodies and their reproductive futures, it is more difficult for them to advance economically. And since women make up more than half of the U.S. population, it matters when something holds women back.

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Because of the Hyde Amendment, women who receive health coverage through Medicaid face two sets of financial obstacles if they need an abortion. First, they must cover the direct costs of the procedure without insurance. A first trimester abortion cost an average of $470 in 2009, which is already more money than many Americans would be able to come up with in the case of an emergency. Second, these women must also bear the practical costs imposed by state restrictions, like multiple doctor’s office visits and unnecessary waiting periods. A low-income single mother who needs to pay for travel to the nearest clinic, a night at a hotel due to a mandatory waiting period, childcare, and lost earnings from work, could end up paying an additional $1,380.

Women who want an abortion but can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs inflicted by Hyde face major consequences over the course of their lifetimes.  Studies show that women who wanted an abortion but were not able to obtain one faced worse economic outcomes, were more likely to live in poverty, and often carried unwanted pregnancies to term.

This isn’t just a burden on these individual women. When women do not have the power to choose the lives they want, it affects everyone.

This is clear on a state level: The states that have the most open access to abortion are often the states that have a general climate of greater opportunity for women. In Massachusetts, where the only restriction on abortion access is parental notification, legislators recently banned employers from asking prospective hires about previous salaries as part of their effort to close the pay gap. At the other end of the spectrum, states that have the most restrictions on abortions oftentimes have lower economic opportunity for women. Alabama and Mississippi are tied for the worst economies for women, and these are also two states with significant abortion restrictions.

This matters on a national level, too. When a woman can gain access to the best opportunities for herself, she will be more productive and earn more. That allows her to contribute more to her local economy and to the GDP in a multiplier effect, where economic activity generates even more economic activity and contributes to growth. Since nearly 21 million adult women are currently covered by Medicaid, that has the potential to make a major impact on the national economy.

The way our country—and our legislators—address bodily autonomy and economic opportunity reflects the value we place on women as full members of our society. If we are a country that values women, regardless of income, then it is time to repeal restrictions on abortion. When our public policies promote the prosperity of women and families, the country prospers too.

In recent weeks, that is the question I continuously find myself asking as I read media accounts of Zika and follow the funding debate in Congress.

Somewhere along the way the focus shifted.  What began as coordinating a response to Zika that is rooted in smart public health policy and caring for our fellow citizens became a funding fight on Capitol Hill in which many conservatives seem completely divorced from reality—particularly the reality of low-income women and children of color living in the South.

This disconnect is not due to a lack of information.  Indeed, lawmakers know well that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that Zika will likely wreak disproportionate havoc on the southern United States. Due to an increase in summer mosquito populations, the South could be a breeding ground for Zika transmission.  Moreover, as the summer months approach, the CDC reports that the number of Zika cases is on the rise.

The Obama Administration certainly hasn’t ignored the urgency of this moment. In February, the Administration announced a $1.9 billion plan to track transmission of the virus, increase testing, institute vaccine research, and prioritize access to health care for low-income pregnant women who are at-risk.  Since then, the President has met with governors from each state and announced a coalition of public health experts and local and national decision-makers who will work together to address transmission of the virus. Yet proposals in the House and Senate both fall well short of what is needed to address the current public health threat.

As the CDC has made clear, the most common way to contract Zika is simply through bites from infected mosquitos. The virus thrives in warm environments with standing water, making low-income people in the South who live in homes without air conditioning, or lack door and window screens, particularly vulnerable.  Additionally, people working jobs that require extended periods of time outside—such as farmworkers and other predominately low-wage workers—are more likely to be exposed to the virus.  Zika can also be transmitted sexually by men to their partners.

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In the South, poverty stricken communities overwhelmingly include people of color who lack access to the kinds of things that will help protect wealthier populations—like health education, livable wages, adequate shelter, and other social support services. Being economically disadvantaged also often translates to a lack of access to comprehensive health services, including reproductive and maternal health care and pediatric care. This is particularly important with regard to Zika, since transmission of the virus among pregnant women can lead to severe birth defects in fetuses, including a congenital brain condition known as microcephaly which can result in developmental disabilities in children.

There is currently no treatment available for microcephaly. Over time, the direct costs associated with caring for a child with the condition could easily exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars for a family—including costs for child care, health care, and lost wages due to providing for a child with a disability.  Expenses like these will increase hardship for low-income families who are already living on the brink.

That is why low-income women need comprehensive counseling and access to the full range of contraceptive methods to prevent unplanned pregnancy right now. Both male and female condoms must be made widely available.  When pregnant women test positive for Zika and want to carry their pregnancies to term, timely prenatal and postnatal care are critical.  Low-income women of color are more likely to delay care and medical treatment for many reasons, including a lack of access to healthcare, no paid leave at work, or inadequate childcare options.  In the event that a woman has to make the decision to terminate her pregnancy, safe abortion should be part of the full continuum of reproductive health care options made available.

With funding for these urgent needs currently held up in Congress, state and local public health responders have been slow to scale plans at the community level. Many local health systems are already operating under strained or inadequate resources, both programmatically and financially, and they need the federal government to step up and respond to these pressing public health concerns.  It comes down to this: we simply do not have time to waste.

What will it take for Congress to recognize the urgency in addressing Zika? We have the opportunity, resources, and plans to protect the American people from this virus.  However, without access to necessary comprehensive health care and social support services, low-income women and families could be looking at even deeper levels of poverty and poorer health outcomes on the horizon.

Since Roe over four decades ago, the Religious Right has used the emotional juggernaut that is their rhetorical reach to shift the focus away from the health, security, and freedom of women and families. Instead, they propagate a narrow and misguided morality that seeks to control women’s bodies without concern for the needs in their lives and to embed a shaming narrative about abortion into the national psyche. Anti-abortion activists have employed these twin strategies—limiting access and shaming women—relentlessly for over 40 years. Unfortunately, in many ways they have been successful.

The first and likely most corrosive victory of that strategy is the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, three years after Roe. Hyde, which was framed as a compromise bill that stopped short of a full ban on abortion access, restricted the use of public funds for abortion. However, author of this amendment Representative Henry Hyde, was very clear about his motives around the compromise:

“I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the [Medicaid] bill.”

Unable to make abortion illegal for all women, Hyde settled for a targeted assault on the options available to poor women. This attack set the stage for the ongoing strategy that Hyde’s acolytes have used ever since. Instead of directly contesting the legality of the issue, anti-abortion activist-legislators have tried to restrict access, availability, and affordability to ensure that abortion is legal only in theory for millions of women.

In many states, the anti-abortion movement has successfully constructed roadblocks to access, such as requiring women to have an ultrasound and look at the image before having abortion or mandating that they attend counseling services. Other legislators have sought to shame minors seeking abortions by limiting or erasing their rights to privacy. Still other anti-abortion legislators have pursued targeted regulation of abortion providers (otherwise known as “TRAP” laws) in the hopes of enacting regulations so burdensome that providers will be forced to close. These efforts to limit access to safe abortion services have been enormously successful.

On the forty-second Roe anniversary, a commentator said, “we no longer have the health crisis of women dying in ‘back alleys.’” Just one year later, that statement is not completely true, particularly for people of color and poor people, like a rural Tennessee woman who has been charged with attempted murder after trying to abort a fetus with a coat hanger. And in other states, women are making unsuccessful abortion attempts of the sort Roe supporters had hoped to eradicate. The clock has turned back in a most vicious way.

And, as some faith voices have supported each of these attacks, some people have been given the impression that all people of faith are against comprehensive health care that includes abortion services. But, what is often obscured is that, before Roe, faith leaders who understood the necessity of family planning in the battle against poverty were in the trenches helping women access safe abortions before legal abortion was available. Because of the desire for human flourishing—present in every faith tradition—progressive faith leaders are still driven to ensure women can access the care they need as opposed to shaming them for their health care decisions. Despite amplified voices suggesting the contrary, many people of faith still broadly understand full-spectrum women’s health care as a primary tool for the building of healthy communities. And, reproductive justice advocates understand a woman’s faith as inseparable from the rest of her lived experiences and attend to spiritual health as seriously as they do all other identified needs.

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We will only be able to truly celebrate Roe when all women have access to abortion services without the stigma and judgment of others. For these reasons, as we pause to reflect on this forty-third anniversary of Roe v. Wade, progressive people of faith must raise our voices in support of the women in our faith communities. The time for staying publicly silent has long passed. Instead, if we care about women of color, low-income women, and families whose fates are too often at the mercy of anti-abortion politicians, we must be bold in our challenge to faith narratives that shame and blame. We must fill the public sphere with language of love and kindness rather than judgment and ire. We must stand up for women of faith because seven in ten women who seek abortions report a religious affiliation. Some of them will look to us for guidance. We owe them our support, our love and our voices in protection of their lives. We must not fail them!

Although we have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of teen pregnancies, the United States still experiences higher rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (including HIV) than other Western countries. Despite this fact, current conservative proposals would cut funding for TPPI by nearly 90 percent. This critical program, which represents one of the two major federal funding streams for comprehensive sex education, works to reduce the number of unplanned teen pregnancies through increasing access to medically-accurate and age-appropriate evidence-based programs, contraception, and reproductive health care services. But instead of backing this successful model, Congress would increase funding for Abstinence Only Until Marriage programs (AOUM) by $10 million, despite the fact that states with abstinence-only education have the highest teen birth rates.

Many AOUM programs (also known by the misleading term “Sexual Risk Avoidance” programs) advance deeply problematic gender expectations and generally ignore the needs of LGBTQ youth or stigmatize homosexuality. They also often provide medically inaccurate information, undermining students’ ability to make safe and informed choices.

This misguided effort by conservatives to gut TPPI fails to address the immediate causes of teen pregnancy. The U.S. has high rates of unplanned pregnancy and STIs relative to other nations likely because we have lower rates of contraceptive use. By contrast, comprehensive sex education, which TPPI helps to provide, increases contraception usage and particularly benefits teens, who are disproportionately likely to experience unplanned pregnancies.

Unlike abstinence-only programs, TPPI also works to address racial disparities in access to comprehensive sex education by specifically focusing on the African American and Hispanic communities. These communities are less likely to receive comprehensive sex education—if any at all—and face higher rates of poverty. Economic deprivation is known to make it more difficult for teens of color to access contraception and other sexual health services. The result is that Hispanic and black youth have the highest teen pregnancy rates—more than double that of white youth—and are disproportionately likely to contract STIs.

The facts clearly show that it is counterproductive for Congress to slash funding for evidenced-based programs while pouring more resources into programs that we know are ineffective. Moreover, it is inequitable, as cutting TPPI funds would specifically harm the students who already face limited access to comprehensive sex education and reproductive health care services.

But while the correlations between poverty, race, and teen pregnancy are undeniable, we have to avoid treating teen pregnancy prevention as a silver-bullet solution to ending poverty. A 30-year study from the University of Pennsylvania that followed 300 teen mothers from Baltimore found that teen childbirth was not the major cause of their economic difficulties. This finding has been supported by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine who also note that, “teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence.” Rather, women who grow up in poverty are likely to live in poverty their entire lives regardless of whether or not they have a baby as a teen or wait until they are older.

But regardless of its effectiveness as an anti-poverty measure, the work of TPPI to reduce the prevalence of STIs and unplanned pregnancy is valuable. The program promotes equality among teenagers and increases students’ agency. Moreover, TPPI is ushering in an important paradigm shift by funding comprehensive sex education aimed at empowering young people to parent when they decide they are ready; this contrasts with the dangerous notion of using contraceptives to reduce the number of poor children, an idea popular among some moderate and conservative politicians that brings to mind a dark history of forced sterilizations and state control over the bodies of low-income women.

Instead of gutting effective programs, our elected leaders should adopt a broad strategy to ensure young people can reach their full potential. While programs like TPPI that fund comprehensive sex education are a central part of this work, the government must also invest in jobs and adopt strong anti-poverty policies in order to bring about more opportunities for social mobility.

The clock is ticking for Congress to act. We need politicians that will fight for the sexual health and empowerment of teenagers, not contest the very existence of the institution they serve.

“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey

In the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. decision on Monday, conservative Supreme Court justices ruled that only some women are entitled to control over their health. This decision represents the latest chapter in an ongoing conservative effort to weaken the reproductive rights of some of the most vulnerable women in the country.

Since no female justice joined the opinion, five men determined that Hobby Lobby and other “closely-held” corporations cannot be compelled to provide insurance coverage for contraception for their employees if they disagree on religious grounds. The owners of Hobby Lobby objected to covering two forms of emergency contraception and two types of intrauterine devices (IUDs) because they feel that using them results in abortion. Although this decision was predicated on objections to four types of birth control, the Supreme Court decision likely affects all twenty contraception methods covered by Affordable Care Act (ACA) regulations. This decision could potentially affect millions of women since “closely-held” corporations employ over 52% of American workers.

The majority bowed to ideology at the expense of science and common sense. There is no medical evidence that emergency contraception, IUDs, or any other form of contraception covered by ACA regulations, cause abortion. In contrast, contraception is designed to prevent unwanted pregnancies that do sometimes lead to an abortion. In an ironic twist, Hobby Lobby objected to providing insurance coverage for IUDs, which are twenty times more effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy than contraception methods lucky enough to receive the Hobby Lobby stamp of approval.

The Hobby Lobby decision furthers the separation of women into distinct economic classes—those who can afford the contraception they want and those who cannot. It undermines the right of millions of women to access vital preventative care regardless of their ability to pay. As Justice Ginsburg noted in her dissent, the cost of obtaining an IUD without insurance is practically equal to the monthly salary of a low-wage worker. Emergency contraception is also expensive—a single dose can cost more than $60. Hobby Lobby places low-income women who cannot pay out of pocket at the mercy of their employers.

The ruling is also intensely harmful to the one in three women who are currently experiencing or will experience domestic violence. An astonishing 99% of survivors report that abusers restrict access to economic resources in some way. Even though some survivors may appear wealthy, they are in fact low-income due to this economic abuse. When employers refuse to cover contraception, the vast majority of survivors cannot afford it. Making matters worse, conservatives also support huge cuts in funding for the Title X clinics that survivors and other low-income women might be able to turn to for access to low-cost contraception in the event that their employer opts out of coverage. Between the actions of a conservative court and Congress, survivors and low-income women simply can’t win.

By decreasing women’s access to contraception, Hobby Lobby empowers abusers. Forcing survivors to have unwanted pregnancies is a common tactic used by abusers to make survivors more dependent on the relationship. The mechanism? Interfering with or failing to use contraception. Twenty-five percent of adolescent survivors report that abusive partners tried to force them to become pregnant by interfering with contraception. Abusers may destroy or hide oral contraceptives; purposely rip holes in condoms or remove them during sex; fail to withdraw as a method of birth control; or forcibly remove other forms of contraception such as patches, vaginal rings, or IUDs.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends several strategies to combat this kind of reproductive coercion. They encourage health care providers to package oral contraceptives in ways that an abuser may not detect, such as in an unmarked envelope. They also promote the practice of inserting IUDs that have the strings removed so that abusers cannot detect their presence. An IUD needs to be inserted every twelve years, as opposed to a shot that needs to be administered every three months, or an oral contraceptive that must be taken daily. As a result, IUDs are arguably the best way to provide unobtrusive, effective contraception to survivors.  Thanks to five male Supreme Court Justices, however, IUDs likely just became much harder to access, and the lives of many low-income women and survivors became much harder too.

Thank you, Mr. Supreme Court.